Doomsday Scenario:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXggtgu1RV3JeVO7fT9Ov-Jk3YsSAVjme6hhLS2xxHep-WK09EaiiAfRN8q8C33Tc76juNdpk8q1VGlT1FGI74_eJFT1giZ4xdIYZp9HJoUteRxEL9XgiZcm0QIsMKx2MlUnvEcriVdC5S/s1600/1-3319-e1162.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXggtgu1RV3JeVO7fT9Ov-Jk3YsSAVjme6hhLS2xxHep-WK09EaiiAfRN8q8C33Tc76juNdpk8q1VGlT1FGI74_eJFT1giZ4xdIYZp9HJoUteRxEL9XgiZcm0QIsMKx2MlUnvEcriVdC5S/s400/1-3319-e1162.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><b style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: large;">What Happens When Banks Control the Economy?</span></b><br />By Michael Hudson<br /><br />Banks weren't meant to be in control of our economy and our governments. How did it get like this and how can we restore sanity to our banking system? <br /><br /><br />In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.<br />Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Professor Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “Mark of model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.<br />If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.<br />Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges.<br /><br />How banks broke the social compact, promoting their own special interests<br />People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of “liars’ loans.”<br />The first step toward today’s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks’ privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the industrial revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities.<br /><br />Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud. Sponsoring an ideological attack on government, they accuse public bureaucracies of “distorting” free markets (by which they mean markets free for predatory behavior). The financial sector is now making its move to concentrate planning in its own hands.<br /><br />The problem is that the financial time frame is notoriously short-term and often self-destructive. And inasmuch as the banking system’s product is debt, its business plan tends to be extractive and predatory, leaving economies high-cost. This is why checks and balances are needed, along with regulatory oversight to ensure fair dealing. Dismantling public attempts to steer banking to promote economic growth (rather than merely to make bankers rich) has permitted banks to turn into something nobody anticipated. Their major customers are other financial institutions, insurance and real estate – the FIRE sector, not industrial firms. Debt leveraging by real estate and monopolies, arbitrage speculators, hedge funds and corporate raiders inflates asset prices on credit. The effect of creating “balance sheet wealth” in this way is to load down the “real” production-and-consumption economy with debt and related rentier charges, adding more to the cost of living and doing business than rising productivity reduces production costs.<br /><br />Since 2008, public bailouts have taken bad loans off the banks’ balance sheet at enormous taxpayer expense – some $13 trillion in the United States, and proportionally higher in Ireland and other economies now being subjected to austerity to pay for “free market” deregulation. Bankers are holding economies hostage, threatening a monetary crash if they do not get more bailouts and nearly free central bank credit, and more mortgage and other loan guarantees for their casino-like game. The resulting “too big to fail” policy means making governments too weak to fight back.<br />The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats – of the banks’ own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society’s rulers.<br /><br />The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector’s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement. Must governments surrender to this power grab? If not, who should bear the losses run up by a financial system that has become dysfunctional? If taxpayers have to pay, their economy will become high-cost and uncompetitive – and a financial oligarchy will rule.<br /><br />The present debt quandary<br /><br />The endgame in times past was to write down bad debts. That meant losses for banks and investors. But today’s debt overhead is being kept in place – shifting bad loans off bank balance sheets to become public debts owed by taxpayers to save banks and their creditors from loss. Governments have given banks newly minted bonds or central bank credit in exchange for junk mortgages and bad gambles – without re-structuring the financial system to create a more stable, less debt-ridden economy. The pretense is that these bailouts will enable banks to lend enough to revive the economy by enough to pay its debts.<br />Seeing the handwriting on the wall, bankers are taking as much bailout money as they can get, and running, using the money to buy as much tangible property and ownership rights as they can while their lobbyists keep the public subsidy faucet running.<br /><br />The pretense is that debt-strapped economies can resume business-as-usual growth by borrowing their way out of debt. But a quarter of U.S. real estate already is in negative equity – worth less than the mortgages attached to it – and the property market is still shrinking, so banks are not lending except with public Federal Housing Administration guarantees to cover whatever losses they may suffer. In any event, it already is mathematically impossible to carry today’s debt overhead without imposing austerity, debt deflation and depression.<br />This is not how banking was supposed to evolve. If governments are to underwrite bank loans, they may as well be doing the lending in the first place – and receiving the gains. Indeed, since 2008 the over-indebted economy’s crash led governments to become the major shareholders of the largest and most troubled banks – Citibank in the United States, Anglo-Irish Bank in Ireland, and Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland. Yet rather than taking this opportunity to run these banks as public utilities and lower their charges for credit-card services – or most important of all, to stop their lending to speculators and gamblers – governments left these banks operating as part of the “casino capitalism” that has become their business plan.<br />There is no natural reason for matters to be like this. Relations between banks and government used to be the reverse. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“The Fair”) set the tone by seizing the Knights Templars’ wealth, arresting them and putting many to death – not on financial charges, but on the accusation of devil-worshipping and satanic sexual practices. In 1344 the Peruzzi bank went broke, followed by the Bardi by making unsecured loans to Edward III of England and other monarchs who died or defaulted. Many subsequent banks had to suffer losses on loans gone bad to real estate or financial speculators.<br /><br />By contrast, now the U.S., British, Irish and Latvian governments have taken bad bank loans onto their national balance sheets, imposing a heavy burden on taxpayers – while letting bankers cash out with immense wealth. These “cash for trash” swaps have turned the mortgage crisis and general debt collapse into a fiscal problem. Shifting the new public bailout debts onto the non-financial economy threaten to increase the cost of living and doing business. This is the result of the economy’s failure to distinguish productive from unproductive loans and debts. It helps explain why nations now are facing financial austerity and debt peonage instead of the leisure economy promised so eagerly by technological optimists a century ago.<br />So we are brought back to the question of what the proper role of banks should be. This issue was discussed exhaustively prior to World War I. It is even more urgent today.<br /><br />How classical economists hoped to modernize banks as agents of industrial capitalism<br />Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, but there was little long-term lending to finance investment in factories or other means of production. British and Dutch merchant banking was to extend short-term credit on the basis of collateral such as real property or sales contracts for merchandise shipped (“receivables”). Buoyed by this trade financing, merchant bankers were successful enough to maintain long-established short-term funding practices. This meant that James Watt and other innovators were obliged to raise investment money from their families and friends rather than from banks.<br /><br />It was the French and Germans who moved banking into the industrial stage to help their nations catch up. In France, the Saint Simonians described the need to create an industrial credit system aimed at funding means of production. In effect, the Saint-Simonians proposed to restructure banks along lines akin to a mutual fund. A start was made with the Crédit Mobilier, founded by the Péreire Brothers in 1852. Their aim was to shift the banking and financial system away from debt financing at interest toward equity lending, taking returns in the form of dividends that would rise or decline in keeping with the debtor’s business fortunes. By giving businesses leeway to cut back dividends when sales and profits decline, profit-sharing agreements avoid the problem that interest must be paid willy-nilly. If an interest payment is missed, the debtor may be forced into bankruptcy and creditors can foreclose. It was to avoid this favoritism for creditors regardless of the debtor’s ability to pay that prompted Mohammed to ban interest under Islamic law.<br /><br />Attracting reformers ranging from socialists to investment bankers, the Saint-Simonians won government backing for their policies under France’s Third Empire. Their approach inspired Marx as well as industrialists in Germany and protectionists in the United States and England. The common denominator of this broad spectrum was recognition that an efficient banking system was needed to finance the industry on which a strong national state and military power depended.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Germany develops an industrial banking system<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />It was above all in Germany that long-term financing found its expression in the Reichsbank and other large industrial banks as part of the “holy trinity” of banking, industry and government planning under Bismarck’s “state socialism.” German banks made a virtue of necessity. British banks “derived the greater part of their funds from the depositors,” and steered these savings and business deposits into mercantile trade financing. This forced domestic firms to finance most new investment out of their own earnings. By contrast, Germany’s “lack of capital … forced industry to turn to the banks for assistance,” noted the financial historian George Edwards. “A considerable proportion of the funds of the German banks came not from the deposits of customers but from the capital subscribed by the proprietors themselves. As a result, German banks “stressed investment operations and were formed not so much for receiving deposits and granting loans but rather for supplying the investment requirements of industry.”<br /><br />When the Great War broke out in 1914, Germany’s rapid victories were widely viewed as reflecting the superior efficiency of its financial system. To some observers the war appeared as a struggle between rival forms of financial organization. At issue was not only who would rule Europe, but whether the continent would have laissez faire or a more state-socialist economy.<br /><br />In 1915, shortly after fighting broke out, the Christian Socialist priest-politician Friedrich Naumann published 'Mitteleuropa,' describing how Germany recognized more than any other nation that industrial technology needed long term financing and government support. His book inspired Prof. H. S. Foxwell in England to draw on his arguments in two remarkable essays published in the Economic Journal in September and December 1917: “The Nature of the Industrial Struggle,” and “The Financing of Industry and Trade.” He endorsed Naumann’s contention that “the old individualistic capitalism, of what he calls the English type, is giving way to the new, more impersonal, group form; to the disciplined scientific capitalism he claims as German.”<br /><br />This was necessarily a group undertaking, with the emerging tripartite integration of industry, banking and government, with finance being “undoubtedly the main cause of the success of modern German enterprise,” Foxwell concluded (p. 514). German bank staffs included industrial experts who were forging industrial policy into a science. And in America, Thorstein Veblen’s 'The Engineers and the Price System' (1921) voiced the new industrial philosophy calling for bankers and government planners to become engineers in shaping credit markets.<br />Foxwell warned that British steel, automotive, capital equipment and other heavy industry was becoming obsolete largely because its bankers failed to perceive the need to promote equity investment and extend long term credit. They based their loan decisions not on the new production and revenue their lending might create, but simply on what collateral they could liquidate in the event of default: inventories of unsold goods, real estate, and money due on bills for goods sold and awaiting payment from customers. And rather than investing in the shares of the companies that their loans supposedly were building up, they paid out most of their earnings as dividends – and urged companies to do the same. This short time horizon forced business to remain liquid rather than having leeway to pursue long term strategy.<br /><br />German banks, by contrast, paid out dividends (and expected such dividends from their clients) at only half the rate of British banks, choosing to retain earnings as capital reserves and invest them largely in the stocks of their industrial clients. Viewing these companies as allies rather than merely as customers from whom to make as large a profit as quickly as possible, German bank officials sat on their boards, and helped expand their business by extending loans to foreign governments on condition that their clients be named the chief suppliers in major public investments. Germany viewed the laws of history as favoring national planning to organize the financing of heavy industry, and gave its bankers a voice in formulating international diplomacy, making them “the principal instrument in the extension of her foreign trade and political power.”<br /><br />A similar contrast existed in the stock market. British brokers were no more up to the task of financing manufacturing in its early stages than were its banks. The nation had taken an early lead by forming Crown corporations such as the East India Company, the Bank of England and even the South Sea Company. Despite the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the run-up of share prices from 1715 to 1720 in these joint-stock monopolies established London’s stock market as a popular investment vehicle, for Dutch and other foreigners as well as for British investors. But the market was dominated by railroads, canals and large public utilities. Industrial firms were not major issuers of stock.<br /><br />In any case, after earning their commissions on one issue, British stockbrokers were notorious for moving on to the next without much concern for what happened to the investors who had bought the earlier securities. “As soon as he has contrived to get his issue quoted at a premium and his underwriters have unloaded at a profit,” complained Foxwell, “his enterprise ceases. ‘To him,’ as the Times says, ‘a successful flotation is of more importance than a sound venture.’”<br />Much the same was true in the United States. Its merchant heroes were individualistic traders and political insiders often operating on the edge of the law to gain their fortunes by stock-market manipulation, railroad politicking for land giveaways, and insurance companies, mining and natural resource extraction. America’s wealth-seeking spirit found its epitome in Thomas Edison’s hit-or-miss method of invention, coupled with a high degree of litigiousness to obtain patent and monopoly rights.<br /><br />In sum, neither British nor American banking or stock markets planned for the future. Their time frame was short, and they preferred rent-extracting projects to industrial innovation. Most banks favored large real estate borrowers, railroads and public utilities whose income streams easily could be forecast. Only after manufacturing companies grew fairly large did they obtain significant bank and stock market credit.<br />What is remarkable is that this is the tradition of banking and high finance that has emerged victorious throughout the world. The explanation is primarily the military victory of the United States, Britain and their Allies in the Great War and a generation later, in World War II.<br />The regression toward burdensome unproductive debts after World War I<br /><br />The development of industrial credit led economists to distinguish between productive and unproductive lending. A productive loan provides borrowers with resources to trade or invest at a profit sufficient to pay back the loan and its interest charge. An unproductive loan must be paid out of income earned elsewhere. Governments must pay war loans out of tax revenues. Consumers must pay loans out of income they earn at a job – or by selling assets. These debt payments divert revenue away from being spent on consumption and investment, so the economy shrinks. This traditionally has led to crises that wipe out debts, above all those that are unproductive.<br />In the aftermath of World War I the economies of Europe’s victorious and defeated nations alike were dominated by postwar arms and reparations debts. These inter-governmental debts were to pay for weapons (by the Allies when the United States unexpectedly demanded that they pay for the arms they had bought before America’s entry into the war), and for the destruction of property (by the Central Powers), not new means of production. Yet to the extent that they were inter-governmental, these debts were more intractable than debts to private bankers and bondholders. Despite the fact that governments in principle are sovereign and hence can annul debts owed to private creditors, the defeated Central Power governments were in no position to do this.<br /><br />And among the Allies, Britain led the capitulation to U.S. arms billing, captive to the creditor ideology that “a debt is a debt” and must be paid regardless of what this entails in practice or even whether the debt in fact can be paid. Confronted with America’s demand for payment, the Allies turned to Germany to make them whole. After taking its liquid assets and major natural resources, they insisted that it squeeze out payments by taxing its economy. No attempt was made to calculate just how Germany was to do this – or most important, how it was to convert this domestic revenue (the “budgetary problem”) into hard currency or gold. Despite the fact that banking had focused on international credit and currency transfers since the 12th century, there was a broad denial of what John Maynard Keynes identified as a foreign exchange transfer problem.<br />Never before had there been an obligation of such enormous magnitude. Nevertheless, all of Germany’s political parties and government agencies sought to devise ways to tax the economy to raise the sums being demanded. Taxes, however, are levied in a nation’s own currency. The only way to pay the Allies was for the Reichsbank to take this fiscal revenue and throw it onto the foreign exchange markets to obtain the sterling and other hard currency to pay. Britain, France and the other recipients then paid this money on their Inter-Ally debts to the United States.<br /><br />Adam Smith pointed out that no government ever had paid down its public debt. But creditors always have been reluctant to acknowledge that debtors are unable to pay. Ever since David Ricardo’s lobbying for their perspective in Britain’s Bullion debates, creditors have found it their self-interest to promote a doctrinaire blind spot, insisting that debts of any magnitude can and should be paid. They resist acknowledging a distinction between raising funds domestically (by running a budget surplus) and obtaining the foreign exchange to pay foreign-currency debt. Furthermore, despite the evident fact that austerity cutbacks on consumption and investment can only be extractive, creditor-oriented economists refused to recognize that debts cannot be paid by shrinking the economy. Or that foreign debts and other international payments cannot be paid in domestic currency without lowering the exchange rate.<br /><br />The more domestic currency Germany sought to convert, the further its exchange rate was driven down against the dollar and other gold-based currencies. This obliged Germans to pay much more for imports. The collapse of the exchange rate was the source of hyperinflation, not an increase in domestic money creation as today’s creditor-sponsored monetarist economists insist. In vain Keynes pointed to the specific structure of Germany’s balance of payments and asked creditors to specify just how many German exports they were willing to take, and to explain how domestic currency could be converted into foreign exchange without collapsing the exchange rate and causing price inflation.<br /><br />Tragically, Ricardian tunnel vision won Allied government backing. Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff claimed that economies receiving German payments would recycle their inflows to Germany and other debt-paying countries by buying their imports. If income adjustments did not keep exchange rates and prices stable, then Germany’s falling exchange rate would make its exports sufficiently more attractive to enable it to earn the revenue to pay.<br /><br />This is the logic that the International Monetary Fund followed half a century later in insisting that Third World countries remit foreign earnings and even permit flight capital as well as pay their foreign debts. It is the neoliberal stance now demanding austerity for Greece, Ireland, Italy and other Eurozone economies.<br />Bank lobbyists claim that the European Central Bank will risk spurring domestic wage and price inflation if it does what central banks were founded to do: finance budget deficits. Europe’s financial institutions are given a monopoly right to perform this electronic task – and to receive interest for what a real central bank could create on its own computer keyboard.<br /><br />But why it is less inflationary for commercial banks to finance budget deficits than for central banks to do this? The bank lending that has inflated a global financial bubble since the 1980s has left as its legacy a debt overhead that can no more be supported today than Germany was able to carry its reparations debt in the 1920s. Would government credit have so recklessly inflated asset prices?<br /><br />How debt creation has fueled asset-price inflation since the 1980s<br /><br />Banking in recent decades has not followed the productive lines that early economic futurists expected. As noted above, instead of financing tangible investment to expand production and innovation, most loans are made against collateral, with interest to be paid out of what borrowers can make elsewhere. Despite being unproductive in the classical sense, it was remunerative for debtors from 1980 until 2008 – not by investing the loan proceeds to expand economic activity, but by riding the wave of asset-price inflation. Mortgage credit enabled borrowers to bid up property prices, drawing speculators and new customers into the market in the expectation that prices would continue to rise. But hothouse credit infusions meant additional debt service, which ended up shrinking the market for goods and services.<br /><br />Under normal conditions the effect would have been for rents to decline, with property prices following suit, leading to mortgage defaults. But banks postponed the collapse into negative equity by lowering their lending standards, providing enough new credit to keep on inflating prices. This averted a collapse of their speculative mortgage and stock market lending. It was inflationary – but it was inflating asset prices, not commodity prices or wages. Two decades of asset price inflation enabled speculators, homeowners and commercial investors to borrow the interest falling due and still make a capital gain.<br /><br />This hope for a price gain made winning bidders willing to pay lenders all the current income – making banks the ultimate and major rentier income recipients. The process of inflating asset prices by easing credit terms and lowering the interest rate was self-feeding. But it also was self-terminating, because raising the multiple by which a given real estate rent or business income can be “capitalized” into bank loans increased the economy’s debt overhead.<br />Securities markets became part of this problem. Rising stock and bond prices made pension funds pay more to purchase a retirement income – so “pension fund capitalism” was coming undone. So was the industrial economy itself. Instead of raising new equity financing for companies, the stock market became a vehicle for corporate buyouts. Raiders borrowed to buy out stockholders, loading down companies with debt. The most successful looters left them bankrupt shells. And when creditors turned their economic gains from this process into political power to shift the tax burden onto wage earners and industry, this raised the cost of living and doing business – by more than technology was able to lower prices.<br /><br />The EU rejects central bank money creation, leaving deficit financing to the banks<br /><br />Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty forbids the ECB or other central banks to lend to government. But central banks were created specifically – to finance government deficits. The EU has rolled back history to the way things were three hundred years ago, before the Bank of England was created. Reserving the task of credit creation for commercial banks, it leaves governments without a central bank to finance the public spending needed to avert depression and widespread financial collapse.<br />So the plan has backfired. When “hard money” policy makers limited central bank power, they assumed that public debts would be risk-free. Obliging budget deficits to be financed by private creditors seemed to offer a bonanza: being able to collect interest for creating electronic credit that governments can create themselves. But now, European governments need credit to balance their budget or face default. So banks now want a central bank to create the money to bail them out for the bad loans they have made.<br /><br />For starters, the ECB’s €489 billion in three-year loans at 1% interest gives banks a free lunch arbitrage opportunity (the “carry trade”) to buy Greek and Spanish bonds yielding a higher rate. The policy of buying government bonds in the open market – after banks first have bought them at a lower issue price – gives the banks a quick and easy trading gain.<br />How are these giveaways less inflationary than for central banks to directly finance budget deficits and roll over government debts? Is the aim of giving banks easy gains simply to provide them with resources to resume the Bubble Economy lending that led to today’s debt overhead in the first place?<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Conclusion</b></span><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirlNdAOGI1gAYfkbpVKzJAOt6Z12sBLer7zPuLheEZxAEXeKX264kC8dMsu-Z87yD4K7MEa1Q_nC-XtqJkA6IBZMynmVd0L7osZoDcMzmDXZXinyUQoCFEAA8OJxwI3R7yyEgtpt6xR_4s/s1600/Control-the-World.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirlNdAOGI1gAYfkbpVKzJAOt6Z12sBLer7zPuLheEZxAEXeKX264kC8dMsu-Z87yD4K7MEa1Q_nC-XtqJkA6IBZMynmVd0L7osZoDcMzmDXZXinyUQoCFEAA8OJxwI3R7yyEgtpt6xR_4s/s400/Control-the-World.jpg" width="303" /></a><br />Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically. When commercial banks gain policy control over governments and central banks, they tend to support their own remunerative policy of creating asset-inflationary credit – leaving the clean-up costs to be solved by a post-bubble austerity. This makes the debt overhead even harder to pay – indeed, impossible.<br />So we are brought back to the policy issue of how public money creation to finance budget deficits differs from issuing government bonds for banks to buy. Is not the latter option a convoluted way to finance such deficits – at a needless interest charge? When governments monetize their budget deficits, they do not have to pay bondholders.<br /><br />I have heard bankers argue that governments need an honest broker to decide whether a loan or public spending policy is responsible. To date their advice has not promoted productive credit. Yet they now are attempting to compensate for the financial crisis by telling debtor governments to sell off property in their public domain. This “solution” relies on the myth that privatization is more efficient and will lower the cost of basic infrastructure services. Yet it involves paying interest to the buyers of rent-extraction rights, higher executive salaries, stock options and other financial fees.<br /><br />Most cost savings are achieved by shifting to non-unionized labor, and typically end up being paid to the privatizers, their bankers and bondholders, not passed on to the public. And bankers back price deregulation, enabling privatizers to raise access charges. This makes the economy higher cost and hence less competitive – just the opposite of what is promised.<br /><br />Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy’s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs. Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan – and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss.<br />This wish means that society should lose, and even suffer depression. We are dealing here not only with greed, but with outright antisocial behavior and hostility.<br /><br />Europe thus has reached a critical point in having to decide whose interest to put first: that of banks, or the “real” economy. History provides a wealth of examples illustrating the dangers of capitulating to bankers, and also for how to restructure banking along more productive lines. The underlying questions are clear enough:<br />* Have banks outlived their historical role, or can they be restructured to finance productive capital investment rather than simply inflate asset prices?<br />* Would a public option provide less costly and better directed credit?<br />* Why not promote economic recovery by writing down debts to reflect the ability to pay, rather than relinquishing more wealth to an increasingly aggressive creditor class?<br /><br />Solving the Eurozone’s financial problem can be made much easier by the tax reforms that classical economists advocated to complement their financial reforms. To free consumers and employers from taxation, they proposed to levy the burden on the “unearned increment” of land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege. The guiding principle was that property rights in the earth, monopolies and other ownership privileges have no direct cost of production, and hence can be taxed without reducing their supply or raising their price, which is set in the market. Removing the tax deductibility for interest is the other key reform that is needed.<br /><br />A rent tax holds down housing prices and those of basic infrastructure services, whose untaxed revenue tends to be capitalized into bank loans and paid out in the form of interest charges. Additionally, land and natural resource rents – along with interest – are the easiest to tax, because they are highly visible and their value is easy to assess.<br /><br />Pressure to narrow existing budget deficits offers a timely opportunity to rationalize the tax systems of Greece and other PIIGS countries in which the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The political problem blocking this classical fiscal policy is that it “interferes” with the rent-extracting free lunches that banks seek to lend against. So they act as lobbyists for untaxing real estate and monopolies (and themselves as well). Despite the financial sector’s desire to see governments remain sufficiently solvent to pay bondholders, it has subsidized an enormous public relations apparatus and academic junk economics to oppose the tax policies that can close the fiscal gap in the fairest way.<br /><br />It is too early to forecast whether banks or governments will emerge victorious from today’s crisis. As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation. The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by providing a public option for credit creation.<br /><br />*This article also appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung.<br /><br />Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).<br /><br />

Doomsday Scenario:

What Happens When Banks Control the Economy? By Michael Hudson Banks weren't meant to be in control of our economy and our governments. ...

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am i red?

A big thank you to Emily A. Clark for the <a href="http://emilyaclark.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-most-of-cozy-corner.html" target="_blank">feature today on her blog</a>!! You sure know how to make a girl blush.<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPtMJ1pYOgz_kD2ET6qK52gRSBWRcxK7f3wG8Js2giw48gYSARTeFcR2xw0SWv9IN3XMdCHsgKJz_XwqXpmAI8hL6jaYlLNvi6YH-5EKHvraJexjff2qKDGIblup6cd-eKvYjycXSsfSjs/s1600/square-button.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://emilyaclark.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-most-of-cozy-corner.html" target="_blank">Emily A. Clark</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br />And welcome to all my new readers. I've got some big things in store this month so stick around, I'm just getting warmed up!<br /><br /><br /><br />

am i red?

A big thank you to Emily A. Clark for the feature today on her blog !! You sure know how to make a girl blush. Emily A. Clark And welcome to...

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THE SYRIAN AGENDA

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3xiZ1-7AADUbubdc-MmAfdRQJ89XJQoSniuu54RlJ-yWRMKlIW8efs2txiP5ny7Yy5rLU9g80zrXwsbic-d7ASWutu31ngFEc5WEAkdf6sCzCLLRUw3pWR7YLrDx-jiBsiIUQdXF7WeNx/s1600/69.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3xiZ1-7AADUbubdc-MmAfdRQJ89XJQoSniuu54RlJ-yWRMKlIW8efs2txiP5ny7Yy5rLU9g80zrXwsbic-d7ASWutu31ngFEc5WEAkdf6sCzCLLRUw3pWR7YLrDx-jiBsiIUQdXF7WeNx/s400/69.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Syrian Presidential Palace  </td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: large;"><b>  </b></span><br /><div style="color: blue; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE ON SYRIA</b></span> </div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Since the uprising in SYRIA mainstream media happily reported what SYRIAN opposition groups provided them without verifying obtained information. Granted, SYRIA has banned most of foreign journalists and media outlets entering the country, thus corroboration of information is difficult. Mainstream media chose to rely on information provided by opposition groups and political entities whose agenda it is to tumble the ASSAD regime. Either Mainstream Media really are not aware that they are used as a propaganda tool by the opposition, or they are fully aware but comply with doctrines set by entities that finance them and who obviously have their own strategy set for SYRIA. </span></div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b>INFORMATION NEVER VERIFIED THROUGH INDEPENDENT SOURCES</b></span></div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Take for example the death toll figure in the SYRIAN uprising. Have they ever been verified by independent sources? Even the UN publishes its death toll figures based on information obtained from SYRIAN OPPOSITION SOURCES, which hardly can be considered as impartial. The same though applies when quoting SYRIAN state run press releases. <br />An example on how mainstream media is used to the advantage of the SYRIAN OPPOSITION is the following article published in the AUSTRIAN daily “DER STANDARD”.</span></div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Here is the translated version, with comments added below.<br /> </span></div><div style="color: blue; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Alleged escape prevented </b></span></div><div style="color: blue; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGS6O9MlVONJaTxnD0coeHT3nDtTb3x6ygEAo2b7W-oEqS6zKI-YkLAsGp6wETJrB67EPzYGD_qz-9zeKG-zDRwkc2TZQ5ve9aZR9fZLefPjvIKdNIIJKgDiJZTK_SUm-cIu1il7xgGPKw/s1600/090+-+Damascus+-+Presidential+palace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGS6O9MlVONJaTxnD0coeHT3nDtTb3x6ygEAo2b7W-oEqS6zKI-YkLAsGp6wETJrB67EPzYGD_qz-9zeKG-zDRwkc2TZQ5ve9aZR9fZLefPjvIKdNIIJKgDiJZTK_SUm-cIu1il7xgGPKw/s320/090+-+Damascus+-+Presidential+palace.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Presidential Palace with </span><span style="color: black; font-size: x-small;">Al- Mazzeh military airport located behind the hill</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Allegedly the wife of SYRIAN President BASHAR AL-ASSAD, ASMAA AL-ASSAD was stopped by SYRIAN opposition forces when traveling in a convoy to the airport, from where she tried to leave the country secretly. SYRIAN opposition successfully prevented her from leaving the country.</i></b></span></div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>According to the EGYPTIAN newspaper "AL-MASRI AL-YOUM ', information to this fact was obtained from SYRIAN OPPOSITION GROUPS on Sunday. The ISRAELI Internet portal YNET reported on Monday.</i></b></span></div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i><br />Members of the opposition "FREE SYRIAN ARMY," stated that the president's wife and several of her relatives were prevented from leaving. ASMAA AL-ASSAD, and their children, the mother of the President and his cousin were in a convoy to the airport when insurgents under the command of a former high-ranking officer engaged in a heavy fire exchange with the security detail of the President, who in the end succeeded to escort the convoy back to the presidential palace. </i></b><br /><br /><span style="color: blue;">Comment on subject matter:</span><br style="color: blue;" /><br style="color: blue;" /><span style="color: blue;">The SYRIAN presidential palace is situated on a hill overlooking Damascus, the international airport is situated on the south eastern outskirts of Damascus where as the AL- MAZZEH Military Airport is situated south-west of the presidential palaces, about 3 km in line of sight of the presidential palace. It is a well known fact that the ASSAD regime has an airplane at standby at AL MAZZEH airport as well as a heavily guarded private road that leads directly from the presidential palace to the airport. </span><br style="color: blue;" /><span style="color: blue;">Furthermore AL MAZZEH military airport houses various helicopter types that can carry heavy equipment and troops and can reach the presidential palace in minutes. So why would ASSAD take the risk and send his wife and relatives in a car convoy from the presidential palace to the international airport which is located more than 16 km from the palace and requires the convoy to pass through the dens city of Damascus, where as AL MAZZEH airbase is at the doorsteps of his palace, with a plane and helicopters on standby and the airbase in total control of Regime loyal elite forces? Even taking the private road from the palace to the airbase would bear no risk due to topographic advantages and security details guarding the entire area. </span><br style="color: blue;" /><br style="color: blue;" /><span style="color: blue;">Looking on how this article came about it does reiterate the claim that mainstream media is not impartial, manipulated or simply unable to connect the dots. The rout this information too was as follows: Egyptian newspaper "Al-Masri al-Youm ' obtained the information from Syrian opposition groups on Sunday, Israeli Internet portal YNET reported on Monday and “Der Standard” adopted it thereafter. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;">Needless to say that this kind of information gathering and distribution is neither objective nor impartial and most probably not even correct. Thus it comes as no surprise that current mainstream media coverage of the SYRIAN uprising is a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and encouragement for alternative media reports and casts serious questions on the true agenda behind the SYRIAN uprising.</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOi2KeMTr9aD98TIJSGf7gaxe0vVaizEvA141sir-R9VXQO92vdCrxnNtfQhK4s7hvXWqpKlKu48JMgW4bjuMzqBoY6HiUEUPr0pYwvK8PATIEyQDroG4tesyNcsfhPOC4lHAok0O8DhFO/s1600/DAMASMAP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="337" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOi2KeMTr9aD98TIJSGf7gaxe0vVaizEvA141sir-R9VXQO92vdCrxnNtfQhK4s7hvXWqpKlKu48JMgW4bjuMzqBoY6HiUEUPr0pYwvK8PATIEyQDroG4tesyNcsfhPOC4lHAok0O8DhFO/s640/DAMASMAP.jpg" width="640" /></a></span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;">In response to mainstream media coverage of the SYRIAN uprising, relying on SYRIAN cell phone YouTube uploads and social network postings and the fact that both internet and mobile phones in SYRIA are rigorously monitored by security forces and the secret police I wrote on 18 August 2011 on this blog:</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">In view of the fact that the ASSAD regime has a tight grip on Internet traffic and mobile phone services it seems highly unlikely that the regime allows to transmit cell phone video clips and social networks to broadcast the uprising and suppression to the outside world, when at the same time it made sure that all foreign media was banned from the country right at the beginning of the uprising in order to avoid international media coverage. </span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><br style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;" /><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">The totalitarian SYRIAN regime that only permitted internet and mobile phones in recent past, (2002) and this under strict censorship, monitors fax transitions (See my article “The Assad Dilemma “, posted on 12 June 2011), expelled all foreign press at the beginning of the uprising, suddenly permits protesters to use freely cell phones to shoot videos portraying anti regime protests and distributing them via face book and the internet without censorship seems hardly likely.</span><br style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;" /><br style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;" /><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">The regime has means to block the internet and mobile phone services in order to stop postings. Nevertheless it seems that protesters have unlimited access to these medias. Furthermore one also has to question how it is possible that such a large amount of SYRIAN citizens are able to own cell phones, given the fact that cell phones and mobile phone services are extremely expensive in SYRIA, the purpose of which is intentional, in order to favor the upper class of SYRIA who so far have refrained from participated in the uprising. Thus one has to question how the poor of the country are able to suddenly afford and use these media tools without outside help or foreign intervention.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>

THE SYRIAN AGENDA

Syrian Presidential Palace    MAINSTREAM MEDIA COVERAGE ON SYRIA Since the uprising in SYRIA mainstream media happily reported what SYRIAN ...

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step into my gallery

The glory of a small cottage is that every room has a distinct purpose. There is no guesswork. No extra rooms that you struggle with how to use. We use every inch of our house and we use it well. With one exception...our 'whatever you call it' space.<br /><br />It isn't really long enough to be considered a hallway, and its not a vestibule or an alcove. Its just a weird purgatory place that has no purpose.<br /><br />It has been three different colors and had countless pieces of furniture in it - bookcases, dressers, arm chairs, tables you name it. For such a small space, it's had more changes that any other room in the house. I'm afraid I've made it a bit schizophrenic. Poor little 'whatever you call it' space.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBuIYc9gj3PM4ga0P_Joe6zfpLwBBbjfS7J40SsvGs3aKDk6QZioQSsNb924Uo3wKAG-SWuKInYQELOyY4hVrsZaLQ3aEQ3mZeNu1UJaOoo80nWjeng1gbZOHyvGt1rHAgBfq5A17SXuxt/s1600/PC312852.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBuIYc9gj3PM4ga0P_Joe6zfpLwBBbjfS7J40SsvGs3aKDk6QZioQSsNb924Uo3wKAG-SWuKInYQELOyY4hVrsZaLQ3aEQ3mZeNu1UJaOoo80nWjeng1gbZOHyvGt1rHAgBfq5A17SXuxt/s640/PC312852.JPG" width="426" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">empty, except for the time-out chair</td></tr></tbody></table>After its latest iteration I cleared the space and figured I would leave it blank until it talked to me and told me what it wanted. It is schizophrenic after all, so talking to me isn't such a crazy idea.<br /><br />And this is how it sat for some time. And for those that know me, you know how difficult it is for me to live with blank walls. But with my new moto 'slow and deliberate' comes patience. Begruding patience.<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRNxkspeZxNQxB1eylSpceOU8BWOyVIwv-Lf7g9kjPucRaT6b9bMZMqy0kAMxOdEsD5TP6IsQYS9v8AXp9hRHVhhrZpc1ohPMdW6mbPY6DRz1_U8Kzez4j4UjTwEa8L2OLNV8Yr1PwnmgJ/s1600/PC312853.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRNxkspeZxNQxB1eylSpceOU8BWOyVIwv-Lf7g9kjPucRaT6b9bMZMqy0kAMxOdEsD5TP6IsQYS9v8AXp9hRHVhhrZpc1ohPMdW6mbPY6DRz1_U8Kzez4j4UjTwEa8L2OLNV8Yr1PwnmgJ/s640/PC312853.JPG" width="426" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It may be a nothing area but Eve finds it a good crawling path</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Then, finally. What? What's that you say walls? You want to become a gallery? Ahhhh (that's the choirs singing in praise) Finally! A decision, a direction. No problemo, a gallery it is. Personally I think it was Pinterest seeping out again as I pin quite a number of gallery walls, like these...<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdHxGFZBgEXZ1TYIljNUAtLuEDuT5v-ozNmmeW11yCUCqbS9YBPMy8B3a1tNR-LrRMGpWBVABheM7FxLHaZBci9c4p4uVj4SZsXqt7iOuEstwVHIj8A9l4IPy6-3bMLsVkkvOcOsaPGlJ6/s1600/keys-side-shot.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdHxGFZBgEXZ1TYIljNUAtLuEDuT5v-ozNmmeW11yCUCqbS9YBPMy8B3a1tNR-LrRMGpWBVABheM7FxLHaZBci9c4p4uVj4SZsXqt7iOuEstwVHIj8A9l4IPy6-3bMLsVkkvOcOsaPGlJ6/s640/keys-side-shot.jpeg" width="428" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">via <a href="http://www.younghouselove.com/2011/04/its-done-and-we-heart-it/" target="_blank">Young House Love</a> </td></tr></tbody></table><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiguFtSIDZTdfAFy5T_dTdDQDgWjx5eDjqxlUkEoVjXu9BySYJFuw5dqK6ePkVmmfz_nJaYYY1zb13KgmU6GCbmpdcsiGuOgEY1iC5hIqbAqGA86EmMP83x7tENud5716bD3kzLq7JIfwFk/s1600/wall-wonders.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiguFtSIDZTdfAFy5T_dTdDQDgWjx5eDjqxlUkEoVjXu9BySYJFuw5dqK6ePkVmmfz_nJaYYY1zb13KgmU6GCbmpdcsiGuOgEY1iC5hIqbAqGA86EmMP83x7tENud5716bD3kzLq7JIfwFk/s640/wall-wonders.jpeg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">via <a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/6896205649007812/" target="_blank">Pinterest</a></td></tr></tbody></table><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg67RVCtuERBxvGU4ERYVH6X9Nwdn1m5woa5_a6kUEMVxLi53lypza-_VpcLUMrYr6Dg1bd9zNpv7zE9V3FgqtZ-akCxKx2TLDwIqvfUaBRmgOJy6-k_8YONgt2q3c2rrVU0My5kVwDZpwP/s1600/Pinned+Image.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg67RVCtuERBxvGU4ERYVH6X9Nwdn1m5woa5_a6kUEMVxLi53lypza-_VpcLUMrYr6Dg1bd9zNpv7zE9V3FgqtZ-akCxKx2TLDwIqvfUaBRmgOJy6-k_8YONgt2q3c2rrVU0My5kVwDZpwP/s640/Pinned+Image.jpeg" width="486" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">via <a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/6896205649077249/" target="_blank">Pinterest</a><br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>But whatever, I let the space think it chose. I'm a team player.<br /><br />I've had gallery walls in the past, but most were pretty organized and followed the 'rules'. You know, all the same type of frame, all the same finish (b&w OR color - heaven forbid both) blah blah.<br /><br />However this time I wanted more quirky, a bit messy, and color. Luckily, due to my addiction to wall coverage of all types, I had plenty of frames to choose from. Wahoo, a $0 project. My favorite!<br /><br />I also thought this would be the perfect time to test out a tutorial I see on blogs and in magazines all the time - creating templates of your frames to organize your wall before hanging. If nothing else, my plaster walls would thank me. <br /><br />To be honest I was skeptical at first that it would be too much time for not much of a difference than the old eyeball method I've honed over the years. But I am an official convert. This is the best way to hang pictures...ever! Period. (and a great way to get some additional use out of the Sunday paper) I'm gonna become a picture handing fool now. Watch out.<br /><br />I'm sure you've read these before, but to recap in a few simple steps:<br /><br />Trace each frame onto a piece of newspaper/craft paper (luckily several of my frames were the same so this step didn't take very long).<br /><br />Cut out each template, marking with a pen where the hook will be, and start to play with the layout.<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYEtfjdG8uzA3Xdxn8V88q3rigTFiG4Bif8cFlviagzFHHuk3ufU7OmS38yYnOAHFv0cni0E-tYuFKL4N5Zt8Jeisn5-f9uOxkl2zOP-MsFOl60fy77iO2peow3EFjgMpxONo2whJ7abGp/s1600/P1022924.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYEtfjdG8uzA3Xdxn8V88q3rigTFiG4Bif8cFlviagzFHHuk3ufU7OmS38yYnOAHFv0cni0E-tYuFKL4N5Zt8Jeisn5-f9uOxkl2zOP-MsFOl60fy77iO2peow3EFjgMpxONo2whJ7abGp/s640/P1022924.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">measure twice, nail once</td></tr></tbody></table>Once the layout is looking good tape those suckers onto the wall.<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRPYvUobhu7RVq1YKe89hmbNDdStcZETlTzbiM3Y9gJ6DJm9l37p11uVf6xVwThmCsg516A89ibdhUHpdbq8jHic2TSbKYQOq996227jvknGu7c7bcnQ4600WdOzj_nzv766knGnIXDz5X/s1600/P1022922.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRPYvUobhu7RVq1YKe89hmbNDdStcZETlTzbiM3Y9gJ6DJm9l37p11uVf6xVwThmCsg516A89ibdhUHpdbq8jHic2TSbKYQOq996227jvknGu7c7bcnQ4600WdOzj_nzv766knGnIXDz5X/s640/P1022922.JPG" width="426" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'suckers taped to the wall'</td></tr></tbody></table>After taping, stand back, move templates around as needed and stand back again. Repeat several times.<br /><br />Use that trusty mark you made earlier on your template to nail thru the template and onto the wall. <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2i_IXhZPKr_h9PZDtv5dWBmkoQxQM4B_jAGxb6VjicLo8W5_UspTwiSH3nsv-c3VuQOakcl_-kwrzmA6Mnc9jbJ62H8hfHVhbYBG0C4uXDP59WdAxhJAxHimbQjl_yz36PLF2o-P90cyD/s1600/P1022926.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2i_IXhZPKr_h9PZDtv5dWBmkoQxQM4B_jAGxb6VjicLo8W5_UspTwiSH3nsv-c3VuQOakcl_-kwrzmA6Mnc9jbJ62H8hfHVhbYBG0C4uXDP59WdAxhJAxHimbQjl_yz36PLF2o-P90cyD/s640/P1022926.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Thank to some help from my husband, the whole process only took about an hour from start to finish. And now our little 'whatever you call it' space has purpose!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOXtGkk5Bj1lSjyF6MrT7ZEpHGNvA3V9MeXAUCxqXjlOrFCvXwJX4U5qP1LXKgeNKW9gFQiaX4Pk8ZGhwdBceqDOpyw0u0ft0lMyGmOBF3q7feMjiZ8ZaxMpcnwBNlB_wuE3wSaG6XyP3k/s1600/P1293502.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOXtGkk5Bj1lSjyF6MrT7ZEpHGNvA3V9MeXAUCxqXjlOrFCvXwJX4U5qP1LXKgeNKW9gFQiaX4Pk8ZGhwdBceqDOpyw0u0ft0lMyGmOBF3q7feMjiZ8ZaxMpcnwBNlB_wuE3wSaG6XyP3k/s640/P1293502.JPG" width="425" /></a></div><br />Doesn't it look so happy?<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjugp9s3ZWOSxs3FcYGJoFqMqVZwkzEgonxMnn-u3qzNjGiZT1z8N8mx6TULhkxqit_F9NRQOD28daRcpceXtH3xDCDwNp5SL0Jmnfefu-xrjgdK8PIHpMCXI61-r9-HlsCrTYVnAiJLrY2/s1600/P1293508.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjugp9s3ZWOSxs3FcYGJoFqMqVZwkzEgonxMnn-u3qzNjGiZT1z8N8mx6TULhkxqit_F9NRQOD28daRcpceXtH3xDCDwNp5SL0Jmnfefu-xrjgdK8PIHpMCXI61-r9-HlsCrTYVnAiJLrY2/s640/P1293508.JPG" width="425" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">With two beautiful girls it wasn't hard at all to find pictures. I also included the chair prints I've been dying to use from <a href="http://danielleoakeyinteriors.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Danielle Oakey</a>. You'll notice her lovely red Chinese Chippendale in the top left and the blue Shield Back Chair in the bottom right.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin2p7NHCb5sDMuPD9oVrmzkFTExkgibfNIJxoU0sgDh0OGvkip3ouk9TWBJoh3PEl-O8FIGfdwbnuh52aLebwF5NgwnL5v_cQ1nBwwahqEzstr-zWhKwvdY64j0LOXwFBMS0tB0GR2HLT2/s1600/P1283495.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin2p7NHCb5sDMuPD9oVrmzkFTExkgibfNIJxoU0sgDh0OGvkip3ouk9TWBJoh3PEl-O8FIGfdwbnuh52aLebwF5NgwnL5v_cQ1nBwwahqEzstr-zWhKwvdY64j0LOXwFBMS0tB0GR2HLT2/s640/P1283495.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>Artwork by the lovely Amelia.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8baiuvLy79qHp-8wL6evWkG7Xv8W2REorENIz9OWs_Wz15SypV6YgSSU90TLnXzNesfNP0hYRR7LNGkDC3witwmbYF-BNvYduC1dIsWrdx5SM7wt8ipt9xEnqUjdosrxKJk65bVgnkLxi/s1600/P1283497.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8baiuvLy79qHp-8wL6evWkG7Xv8W2REorENIz9OWs_Wz15SypV6YgSSU90TLnXzNesfNP0hYRR7LNGkDC3witwmbYF-BNvYduC1dIsWrdx5SM7wt8ipt9xEnqUjdosrxKJk65bVgnkLxi/s640/P1283497.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>The silhouette is Amelia from a few years back. The black and white is a favorite picture of my great-grandfather holding my newborn mom. And yes, that is a pipe in his mouth.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIEr_OrUdKrVilRscA0VSbfjWmIq-U98YApmLKPhN-r0fWuR7m8lAjIxYuKb__I1-cF-C5uetiBs7fcvx47IVM-EQNEf6xcV2bYoWMK_HyKdN1Qqdzy6I1XWvxUUxItwG1pN73zqZ45rUc/s1600/P1293505.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIEr_OrUdKrVilRscA0VSbfjWmIq-U98YApmLKPhN-r0fWuR7m8lAjIxYuKb__I1-cF-C5uetiBs7fcvx47IVM-EQNEf6xcV2bYoWMK_HyKdN1Qqdzy6I1XWvxUUxItwG1pN73zqZ45rUc/s640/P1293505.JPG" width="425" /></a></div>Now there is some good eye candy for anyone who has to do time in the timeout chair.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0RcvhgcAi47Og3Deidjl4zhQtoVg0-bjLKj1i01__D92qGgvAGpydz7AI8G1xdzPC7VT9NqoFgo2lB4SaWgqOBh17RJjeF9krssNDEzR6oG8m800txjtNevFBzukEs2S4J0BaA0y6QrpQ/s1600/P1293512.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0RcvhgcAi47Og3Deidjl4zhQtoVg0-bjLKj1i01__D92qGgvAGpydz7AI8G1xdzPC7VT9NqoFgo2lB4SaWgqOBh17RJjeF9krssNDEzR6oG8m800txjtNevFBzukEs2S4J0BaA0y6QrpQ/s640/P1293512.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So there you have it. An easy way to add some jazz and purpose to an otherwise unused space. Have any of you tried the Gallery Wall tutorials out there? Have any tricks for hanging things on plaster walls? Anyone else LOVE getting fresh flowers from Trader Joe's?</div><br /></div>

step into my gallery

The glory of a small cottage is that every room has a distinct purpose. There is no guesswork. No extra rooms that you struggle with how to ...

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Quick file-sharing is so easy with Skype

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Have you ever been in a situation when you are at a friend's house, you both have your laptops and you both want to share large documents that are too big for email with one another QUICKLY. Your dropbox is full and you don't have a flashdrive with you! So what do you do? One of the quickest solutions is to try file-sharing with Skype. I discovered this recently when I was in just that predicament. File-sharing with Skype is so quick and easy that I am DEFINITELY going to make a lot more use of it. <br /><br />Here are the steps. <br /><div id="__ss_11366312" style="width: 425px;"><b style="display: block; margin: 12px 0 4px;"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/fionabeal/file-sharing-with-skype" target="_blank" title="File sharing with Skype">File sharing with Skype</a></b> <iframe frameborder="0" height="355" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/11366312" width="425"></iframe> <br /><div style="padding: 5px 0 12px;">View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/" target="_blank">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/fionabeal" target="_blank">fionabeal</a> </div></div><br /></div>

Microsoft Tutorials Quick file-sharing is so easy with Skype

Have you ever been in a situation when you are at a friend's house, you both have your laptops and you both want to share large document...

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Exercising for YOU

I'm glad I've reincorporated workouts back into my life.  I had definitely taken some time off during most of October/November/December.  Easing back into it with just 2 days per week have really worked to my advantage.  It's just enough to make a difference for weight loss and make me feel good, and also just the right amount so that I'm not bored by doing the same few machines over and over 4-5 days/week.  Not to mention the fact that it's been just enough to motivate me to keep going every week! <br /><br />Right around the start of the new year I was trucking away on the elliptical reading an article in a magazine,  and it talked about how important it is <i>not </i>to<i> </i>compare your weight loss journey to others.  It talked about how you do what you have to do for <i>yourself - </i>what feels comfortable for <i>you</i>.  It mentioned how there are countless studies that say you must do x, y and z {in terms of exercise} in order to achieve "real" results.  What really rang true to me in this article was that it stressed how each weight loss journey is unique to that individual.  <i> </i><br /><br /><ul><li>You<i> do what </i>you're<i> capable of doing.</i>  <i> </i></li><li>You <i>do what feels right for </i>you <i>at this point in your life.  </i></li><li>You <i>can achieve "real" results just by doing something so </i>simple <i>as walking every day.  <br /> </i></li></ul><br />Yes, you can challenge yourself, but you don't have to make the exercise part of weight loss so overwhelming by telling yourself that you must do 10 variations of weight moves and 5 levels of intensity on the elliptical/treadmill/stairmaster, etc, every single day in order to achieve weight loss success.  I was definitely getting to that point with exercise.  I had spreadsheets of exact things I needed to be doing each day at the gym.  Sometimes this proved beneficial, mixing up the monotony of my typical routine.  However, what it really did was drive me away from the gym... for almost 3 solid months.  Why?  Because it all just became overwhelming.<br /><br /><div style="color: #999999; text-align: center;">{I don't really want to make this<br />weight loss journey <span style="color: #999999;">any more difficult/stressful/overwhelming </span><br /><span style="color: #999999;">than it already is.}</span>   </div><br />Before blogging, I would say I didn't struggle much with comparing my journey to others.  However, now that I read a lot of weight loss and fitness blogs, I have found myself thinking: <br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>"Well they are doing 5 days/week at the gym, I need to do the same!  They are doing all these weight moves and cardio intervals, I need to do the same!  Otherwise, I'm not really measuring up in this 'weight loss community' and I'm not going to achieve 'real' results."</i></blockquote><br />At this point in my life right now, I want <i>simple</i>.  I know that walking works.  I proved that to myself as a sophomore in college, when I lost 50 lbs, bringing me to my lowest adult weight ever.<br /><br />By no means am I saying that <i>you </i>should just walk or run and nix the rest of the exercise choices.  No.  Lifting weights can be fun and obviously provides great health benefits.<br /><br />But, if you're finding yourself overwhelmed at the thought of all there is to do at the gym, try starting simply first.  It really has made all the difference for me.       <br /><br /><b style="color: #674ea7;">Can you relate to this?</b>

Exercise Exercising for YOU

I'm glad I've reincorporated workouts back into my life.  I had definitely taken some time off during most of October/November/Decem...

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Vertigo for Life

<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">by guest contributor Dan Auiler</span></span></i><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-mSy7uqYMb3N3Bo1O6fcC21NtQ2vcxYG5Bl0iui6xyPbQhNtWVu_gzY33VmsPM8aee8Q1vzQCscmKFSjTvuWvptr-8tPZ1I5JAE9oqGOLIZ8zV6VzmzSF6txYIsm6l87J1dxvBqn8R5hd/s1600/saul+bass+2+b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-mSy7uqYMb3N3Bo1O6fcC21NtQ2vcxYG5Bl0iui6xyPbQhNtWVu_gzY33VmsPM8aee8Q1vzQCscmKFSjTvuWvptr-8tPZ1I5JAE9oqGOLIZ8zV6VzmzSF6txYIsm6l87J1dxvBqn8R5hd/s1600/saul+bass+2+b.jpg" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A month of <i>Vertigo </i>is light sentence. Most of us who encounter this film end up serving life sentences. Our lives, our thoughts become trapped in the vortex of the strong currents this film produces. <i>Vertigo</i>'s meaning and importance in film have become so varied and vital that choosing one tendril spinning out from one of John Whitney's Lissajous diagrams is challenging - but keeping that line of thought from swirling back into the film's center and tossing you out on some other surprising shore is just about impossible.</span></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><a name='more'></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BzB31mD4NmA?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The film has become something I can seldom approach head-on, in a straight line. For example, the original idea for this blog post was to look at <i>Vertigo</i> and the films of Chris Marker. But even on the way to introducing the idea, we encounter John Whitney. John Whitney was the groundbreaking computer animation filmmaker who not only invented</span></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">computer controlled animation, but hand-machined the devices himself out of surplus Air Force engines. It was on one of these devices that Whitney created the opening spiral designs that Saul Bass used for the title sequence.</span></span><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7yyQeHdQDXU?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And now, aiming still at Chris Marker, detoured out of essence to a brief John Whitney nod, we encounter another 20th century giant, Saul Bass. The very look of the last hundred years, let alone the way movies open, have been impacted by the vision and design abilities of Saul Bass.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Selecting Saul Bass, John Whitney - these are obvious choices today. In 1957, these guys were not household names even to filmmakers. One of Hitchcock's remarkable abilities was his choice in collaborators. Other posts this month have outlined the other key components of the design team for <i>Vertigo</i>. Bernard Herrmann, Edith Head, Samuel Taylor - again, hindsight provokes us to ask how the film could fail.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQWUuqMf7mVMEy2xw1JSOKvmS4w2xeChDm2WtNpJn_1-BiQQRtSQdil1Jk3YGJKaA2ub0ezR00sdjgkyiT0RAW7fU5lskcV546eqQTIathWdAQk3A9pde5YrGc6KOTz8Gi9ujknbIxv1re/s1600/la+jetee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQWUuqMf7mVMEy2xw1JSOKvmS4w2xeChDm2WtNpJn_1-BiQQRtSQdil1Jk3YGJKaA2ub0ezR00sdjgkyiT0RAW7fU5lskcV546eqQTIathWdAQk3A9pde5YrGc6KOTz8Gi9ujknbIxv1re/s1600/la+jetee.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>La Jetee</i> (1962)</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Now I'm far from Chris Marker. But I thought you would appreciate the detour. Marker has also been a life-long devotee of <i>Vertigo</i>. His break-out short film <i>La Jetee</i> references the film's famous tree sequence; <i>La Jetee </i>is a further examination of the aspects of time, obsession and our movable points in time. (here is the complete text to <i>La Jetee</i>: </span><a href="http://www.markertext.com/la_jetee.htm" style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>La Jetee</i> by Chris Marker</span></a><span style="color: black;">)</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Marker, in a later work of opposite dimensions, <i>San Soleil</i>, tours San Francisco and <i>Vertigo</i>'s film locations, marking in film at least the first of the pilgrims to visit Lombard Street, Fort Point, the Legion of Honor art museum, San Juan Bautista. <i>Vertigo </i>aficionados feel compelled to make this pilgrimage. It was my first trip after college. I'm not sure why this was so vital - but I am not alone. (There are several paid tours of the film sites available)</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i> </i></span></span></span><br /><div style="text-align: right;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAgQqf0jLnHob02A1hhaifwO0bLXSpmmwQlrAfieHwWWHWgsVfW-u6IX3N4EgC63spTcU1YysY3F7jNZEy0G2cbxOhJuefTndZRN32aHRZo8zhanXjlawX4-DAyiI5A0rfj5bAyTOzYOq4/s1600/chris+marker.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAgQqf0jLnHob02A1hhaifwO0bLXSpmmwQlrAfieHwWWHWgsVfW-u6IX3N4EgC63spTcU1YysY3F7jNZEy0G2cbxOhJuefTndZRN32aHRZo8zhanXjlawX4-DAyiI5A0rfj5bAyTOzYOq4/s1600/chris+marker.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Filmmaker Chris Marker</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>Vertigo </i>and its production history led me to discover Marker. His reference to the film in his own was the starting point. Now I'm fascinated by his total mess-with-your-head understanding (or non-understanding) of time. The English version of <i>San Soleil</i> begins with these lines from TX Eliot's <i>Ash Wednesday</i>:</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"Because I know that time is always time</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">and place is always and only place</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And what is actual is actual only for one time</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">and only for one place."</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What then is the time and place for <i>Vertigo</i>? This is a profound question in the structure of the film. It is an even more profound question for us, the film's fans.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What is the time and place of this film in our lives? For me, it has been the gateway, the worm hole, the central vortex around which all of Hitchcock's films and subsequently my own psychic life turn.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Use <i>Vertigo</i> as a starting point and then lose yourself as a wanderer. My latest encounter on the <i>Vertigo </i>trail is the three-part video essay curated<span style="color: #990000;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/vertigo-variations-pt-1-20110921" target="_blank"><span style="color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">here</span></a></span></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">at</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> the Museum of Moving Image. This is accessible but heady stuff.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There are other "better" films even in the Hitchcock canon, but <i>Vertigo </i>is perhaps the most profound pop film. Everyone chooses which films lie closest to their own heart, their own story.<i> Vertigo </i>is that film for me.</span></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><object height="372" width="448"><param name="movie" value="http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=158/976"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.movingimagesource.us/flash/mediaplayer.swf?id=158/976" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" width="448" height="372"></embed></object></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">~</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjax1r6UwNlB9eHzb8KnhG6B9f30w0i8gVxJfLpB1pGkg0z2XVVVwqSnLYXrGx_JZpr79T2ie_jzWJkVvwHttl6Ndm51qO1zVRmvbt5swdrsYuEeJMr_778E5W2-CarNaGnuJkt1ELPpa35/s1600/vertigo+book+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjax1r6UwNlB9eHzb8KnhG6B9f30w0i8gVxJfLpB1pGkg0z2XVVVwqSnLYXrGx_JZpr79T2ie_jzWJkVvwHttl6Ndm51qO1zVRmvbt5swdrsYuEeJMr_778E5W2-CarNaGnuJkt1ELPpa35/s320/vertigo+book+cover.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><span style="font-size: small;">Dan Auiler is the best-selling author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FUEM0E/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=hitchcblog-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B005FUEM0E&adid=0SRR1ZSGX9A4SMT0GPMQ&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fvertigofalls.blogspot.com%2F" style="color: #990000;"><u>Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic</u></a><i> </i>(St. Martin's Press 1998, Kindle 2011) and <u>Hitchcock's Notebooks</u> (HarperCollins 1999). In addition to his writing, he has taught for more than 20 years in the Los Angeles area. </span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">Dan is considered one of the foremost authorities on Alfred Hitchcock and has made appearances on CNN and other major networks as an expert on Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and general film history.</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">It was after reading Dan's painstakingly researched and thoroughly insightful book on <i>Vertigo </i>that The Lady Eve was inspired to undertake <i>A Month of VERTIGO. </i>Dan's blog is <a href="http://vertigofalls.blogspot.com/" style="color: #990000;">Vertigo Falls</a>.</span></div>

A Month of Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock Chris Marker Dan Auiler John Whitney La Jetee San Soleil Saul Bass Vertigo for Life

by guest contributor Dan Auiler A month of Vertigo is light sentence. Most of us who encounter this film end up serving life sentences. Our ...

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One of those days…

<p>It’s Monday morning. Adelyn’s cry quickly gets me on my feet. I rush in to pick her up and see that it’s only 4am. Not how I planned to start my day…or at least not the hour I planned to start my day!</p> <p>Maybe it’s when you pour yourself a bowl of cereal and realize there’s no milk left. Or maybe you get to the gym and find that you forgot to pack an important part of your workout gear…your shoes!</p> <p>Whatever it may be, you can’t let it derail you! </p> <p>It’s just been one of those days where I don’t feel like myself and I’ve had to consciously tell myself STAY ON TRACK! I think it all comes back what I mentioned in my <a href="http://weightloss-stories.blogspot.com/2012/01/its-going-to-be-different.html">post last week</a> about this whole process and how it’s a head game. </p> <p>One day at a time, I can do this!</p> <p>I’m proud to say I’ve been on within my WW points all day! It’s a warm 60 degree January day and I’m going to take my baby girl on a walk! Vitamin D is always good for the soul!</p> <p>So here’s my two cents friends…even if it is “one of those days”, don’t let it derail you! Stay on track, push through, and remember tomorrow’s a new day! </p>

One of those days…

It’s Monday morning. Adelyn’s cry quickly gets me on my feet. I rush in to pick her up and see that it’s only 4am. Not how I planned to star...

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How to send emails using Microsoft Word and Mail Merge

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">There are times when I need to send out the same emails to a whole lot of people, and after trying one method after another I decided it was time to teach myself Mail Merge.  I took screenshots of my journey which I will now share with you in case you want to do something similar. What a timesaver it has proved to be! Now why didn't I think of this a whole lot earlier!<br /><div id="__ss_11339815" style="width: 425px;"><b style="display: block; margin: 12px 0 4px;"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/fionabeal/create-emails-using-mail-merge" title="Create emails using mail merge">Create emails using mail merge</a></b><object height="355" id="__sse11339815" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=createemailsusingmailmerge-120130143733-phpapp02&stripped_title=create-emails-using-mail-merge&userName=fionabeal" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><embed name="__sse11339815" src="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=createemailsusingmailmerge-120130143733-phpapp02&stripped_title=create-emails-using-mail-merge&userName=fionabeal" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><br /><div style="padding: 5px 0 12px;">View more <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/">presentations</a> from <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/fionabeal">fionabeal</a>.</div></div><br /><br /><br /></div>

Microsoft Slideshare Tutorials How to send emails using Microsoft Word and Mail Merge

There are times when I need to send out the same emails to a whole lot of people, and after trying one method after another I decided it was...

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Library Assistant - Silver Hill Hospital

<strong>Library Assistant</strong> - <span style="color: #48286d;"><strong>Silver Hill Hospital</strong></span>, one of the premier psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals in the country, seeks Library Assistant. Part Time Days, 12:00pm – 5:00pm, Saturdays & Sundays. AS Degree or Undergraduate Student, excellent customer service and computer skills required. Library experience preferred. Duties include a variety of clerical and library tasks, basic support services and services to patrons. Responsibility for routine circulation, shelf maintenance and clerical functions using an automated circulation system. For consideration, please send resume to: <a href="mailto:careers@silverhillhospital.org">careers@silverhillhospital.org</a> or Human Resources, Silver Hill Hospital, 208 Valley Road, New Canaan, CT 06840; <a href="http://www.silverhillhospital.org/" target="_blank">www.silverhillhospital.org</a>. EOE M/F/D/V.

Library Assistant - Silver Hill Hospital

Library Assistant - Silver Hill Hospital , one of the premier psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals in the country, seeks Library Ass...

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Children’s Librarian - Torrington Library

<b>Children’s Librarian</b> - [salary unknown] The <span style="color: #48286d;"><b>Torrington Library</b></span> is seeking a Children’s Librarian who is energetic, enthusiastic, organized and creative with superior customer service skills who will enjoy working in a busy environment serving a diverse community. Successful candidate will be flexible, able to work as part of a team, have a willingness to learn, a love of working with children and a passion for public service. An opportunity to work in an architecturally-beautiful building in a downtown setting. The successful candidate will possess: Experience working with children; Ability to work with parents; Ability to assume full responsibility for operation of Children’s Room; Ability to be proactive and plan ahead for programs and events; Supervisory skills; Ability to plan imaginative programs for children from birth to 12 years; Ability to contribute to our website; Strong written and verbal communication skills including the ability to communicate effectively and positively with library visitors of all ages; Proficiency in desktop applications including Excel and Word; Ability to work collaboratively with schools and community groups; Knowledge of children’s literature and ability to maintain and develop the collection; Ability to assist in short and long range planning for library services. Responsibilities include but are not limited to: Programming; Outreach, both on and off-site, including coordination of our annual Doorway to Learning Initiative; Preparation of statistical reports; Working collaboratively with library director and taking direction as needed; Design of promotional materials and news releases; Collection development; Administration of juvenile materials & program budgets; Supervision of Children’s Room assistant and other staff as required; Keeping Children’s Room in order and decorated seasonally. Covering service areas beyond the Children’s Room as needed. This is a full time, salaried position, 35 hours per week including evening and Saturday hours. Also includes paid vacation, sick days and medical benefits (employee only). Submit resume with cover letter postmarked no later than <span style="color: red;">February 15, 2012</span> to: Library Director, Torrington Library, 12 Daycoeton Place, Torrington, CT 06790-6399. No phone inquiries, please. EOE.

Children’s Librarian - Torrington Library

Children’s Librarian - [salary unknown] The Torrington Library is seeking a Children’s Librarian who is energetic, enthusiastic, organize...

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Reference Librarian I - Guilford Free Library

<strong>Reference Librarian I</strong> - <span style="color: #48286d;"><strong>Guilford Free Library</strong></span>. 24 hours per week - $18.84 hourly - no benefits. Strong public service skills are required for this position. Duties include: assisting patrons in selection, organization and interpretation of materials; instructing patrons in the use of the library’s collections including online databases, downloadable materials and evolving technologies; performing duties relating to maintaining and administering the Library’s various information systems, including the library website; acting as a library representative to professional organizations, Town officials, community groups, schools and businesses. This entry-level professional position requires an ALA-accredited Masters of Library Science. Candidates who are close to completion in an MLS program may be considered. Application and job description are available at: <a href="http://www.ci.guilford.ct.us/human-resources.htm" target="_blank">http://www.ci.guilford.ct.us/human-resources.htm</a>. Application deadline is: Friday, <span style="color: red;">February, 10, 2012</span> at 3:00PM. Applications may be mailed to: Mitch Goldblatt, Director of Human Resources, Town of Guilford, 31 Park Street, Guilford, CT 06437.

Reference Librarian I - Guilford Free Library

Reference Librarian I - Guilford Free Library . 24 hours per week - $18.84 hourly - no benefits. Strong public service skills are require...

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Library Media Specialist - Redding Elementary School

<strong>Library Media Specialist</strong> - <span style="color: #48286d;"><strong>Redding Elementary School</strong></span>. .4 FTE Library Media Specialist position is available beginning April 2012 through June 2013. Candidates must hold the appropriate certification for this position. Hours: 8:00 a.m. - 2:50 p.m., two days per week (Tuesday and Thursday for 2011-2012 academic year; 2012-13 academic year to be determined). Salary and Benefits: In accordance with the bargaining unit contract. Ideal Candidates Will Possess: Enthusiasm for teaching and learning; motivation to work as part of a team to integrate library/media with grade level curriculum content; desire to implement emerging technologies to support 21st Century skills; ability to meet the diverse and developmental learning needs of elementary age learners; strong collaboration and communication skills; strong technology skills and familiarity with a variety of reserach databases, Follett Destiny software, curriculum related Web sites, and Microsoft Office Suite software. Responsibilities: This part time position works in tandem with a full-time library media specialist. Both teachers are responsible for the library media instruction on a set schedule in an elementary setting. Additional collaboration includes embedding technology and media literacy and 21st Century skills into existing curriculum, kindergarten through 4th grade. Applications will only be accepted online at the Central Office Web site: <a href="http://www.er9.org/" target="_blank">www.er9.org</a> under the "Job Openings" link. Applicants must submit the following: Formal letter of application, resume, three letters of recommendation, official transcripts of all post-secondary education, copy of appropriate CT certification - Library Media Specialist. Application Deadline: Until filled. The Redding Board of Education is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Library Media Specialist - Redding Elementary School

Library Media Specialist - Redding Elementary School . .4 FTE Library Media Specialist position is available beginning April 2012 through...

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Library Assistant III - Otis Library

<strong>Library Assistant III</strong> - <span style="color: #48286d;"><strong>Otis Library</strong></span> has an opening for a Part Time Library Assistant III to work approximately 20 hours per week. We are looking for a positive and organized individual who has superior customer service skills. Responsibilities include: general patron assistance, circulation duties and services, excellent computer skills and ability to learn new technologies, eBook knowledge, and the ability to relate to patrons of all ages. Daytime, evening, and Saturday rotation hours included. Library experience and LTA preferred. Please send resumes by e-mail to <a href="mailto:bfarwell@otis.lioninc.org">bfarwell@otis.lioninc.org</a> or by U.S. mail to Robert Farwell, Director, Otis Library, 261 Main Street, Norwich CT 06360.

Library Assistant III - Otis Library

Library Assistant III - Otis Library has an opening for a Part Time Library Assistant III to work approximately 20 hours per week. We ar...

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Part-Time Children’s Department Assistant - Berlin-Peck Library

<strong>Part-Time Children’s Department Assistant</strong> - The Berlin-Peck Library, Berlin, CT is seeking an enthusiastic, forward-thinking person to complement the Children’s Department team. The candidate will plan and present programs, assist patrons and other duties as they present themselves within the department. Please see the <a href="http://www.town.berlin.ct.us/filestorage/193/209/PT_Children%27s_Dept_Assistant_1_26_12.pdf" target="_blank">complete job description</a> <img alt="PDF icon" src="http://www.ctlibrarians.org/associations/10663/files/pdf.jpg" /> . The position is 20 hours per week plus every 3rd Saturday. Salary is $18.00 per hour; no medical benefits. Please send a resume, meaningful cover letter and a <a href="http://www.town.berlin.ct.us/filestorage/193/209/emp_app.pdf" target="_blank">Town of Berlin application</a> <img alt="PDF icon" src="http://www.ctlibrarians.org/associations/10663/files/pdf.jpg" /> to: Office of the Town Manager, 240 Kensington Road, Berlin, CT 06037 by 12:00 p.m. on Friday, February 17, 2012.

Part-Time Children’s Department Assistant - Berlin-Peck Library

Part-Time Children’s Department Assistant - The Berlin-Peck Library, Berlin, CT is seeking an enthusiastic, forward-thinking person to co...

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<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlFImmIoblSPsUZQ48XQAZu1HNlWwaA_ceQl_QckTinf16A2IMxZjIH86sPQ1mjkQJML3Jz-Az2bgbXY3rmrxhKWjqMB8gceZCW0ELDc_r6BQYyhgj0ZcCm0UlyJeAvv0xgEDZQlX8Xii/s1600/Conspiracy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWlFImmIoblSPsUZQ48XQAZu1HNlWwaA_ceQl_QckTinf16A2IMxZjIH86sPQ1mjkQJML3Jz-Az2bgbXY3rmrxhKWjqMB8gceZCW0ELDc_r6BQYyhgj0ZcCm0UlyJeAvv0xgEDZQlX8Xii/s400/Conspiracy.jpg" width="281" /></a></div><div style="color: #351c75; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Financial Illiteracy of Those Who Mock Conspiracy Theorists</b></span></div><br />Article by Anthony Wile via Daily Bell<br /><br />From Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS), a journal from the independent publisher Sage Publications, comes an article that has predictably seen wide distribution on the Internet. It implies that those who believe in globalist CONSPIRACY THEORIES are illogical – even downright nutty.<br /><br />The article is entitled  "Dead and Alive: Beliefs in CONTRADICTORY CONSPIRACY THEORIES" and the thesis of the article is that people who believe in conspiracy theories eventually become so immersed in them and so mesmerized that they do not realize they are holding contradictory beliefs.<br />"Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement." (SPPS Abstract)<br />"Conspiratorialists" become so distrustful of "government" and "authority" that they will impute any and every kind of malevolence to them.<br /><br />Thus it is that people can claim, on the one hand, that Osama bin Laden is "dead" and died years ago, while simultaneously claiming that bin Laden remains alive and that US and Pakistan government authorities are not being truthful about him and his physical state.<br />Of course, I've never run into anyone, who claims that bin Laden is ALIVE. But it's true that here at the Daily Bell we've run articles explaining that bin Laden probably died years ago. <br /><br />The SPPS article would likely have you believe this is an outrageous conspiracy theory. But given that FOX news ran a report on bin Laden's death in 2001, and given that Pakistan's former president Benazir Bhutto herself claimed that bin Laden died in the early 2000s (supposedly as the result of an assassination), it doesn't seem so far-fetched to speculate that bin Laden didn't die as the result of a US raid in 2011.<br />But that's almost minor stuff. Articles like this, despite their scientific patina, are deeply illiterate. Why so? Because invariably such articles won't deal with the bedrock financial illiteracy of current economic and political paradigms.<br />Imagine if the world were based on lies. Well, unfortunately, that's the truth. The lies go far beyond "who shot JFK" or whether the US government was directly or indirectly involved in 9/11.<br />When one uses the logical framework of Austrian, free-market analysis to analyze the Way the World Works in the modern age, one inevitably comes to the conclusion that modern society is built around fundamental untruths.<br />The first one is economic: It is the idea that central bankers can efficiently and effectively set the price of money. They cannot.<br /><br />Every time central bankers decide on how much money to print or where short interest rates should be, the decisions are "fixing" prices – and price-fixing never works. Price-fixing distorts economies and causes a wealth shift from those who create it to those who don't and may not know what to do with it. Over time, aggressively mis-priced money causes first recessions and then depressions.<br /><br />The second lie is that laws and regulations are necessary and that they can save society from "anarchy." In fact, anarchy is only the absence of government. That's the real definition. And absence of government does not necessarily imply "chaos." Just as setting interest rates fixes the price of money, so every law and regulation is a price fix as well, preventing someone from doing something within the context of the marketplace. This also constitutes a wealth transfer.<br />One can have a perfectly adequate and satisfying society without formal government, certainly without the kinds of intrusive and murderous governments we've got today. History is full of examples of societies that flourished with at least minimal government, especially societies where power truly flowed from the bottom up.<br /><br />The third lie is that government is essential for purposes of defense and defending its citizens. But a quick survey of modern wars shows a disturbing tendency of governments – especially certain Western governments – to foment the very wars that citizens believe they're being protected from.<br />War is the "health of the state" – the way that those in power consolidate their hold while punishing their enemies using phony pretexts having to do with "treason" and "leaking classified information." Sound familiar?<br />It is what we call the Internet Reformation that has gradually shed light on the fundamental untruths permeating modern society in both the developed and developing world.<br /><br /><b>The Internet, like the Gutenberg before it, is a revolutionary device that has allowed people access to information that was hitherto denied or covered up, especially in the 20th century when the power elites control over society was perhaps at its apex.</b><br /><br />A conspiracy likely DOES exist. The Internet easily reveals not just facts that illuminate it, but also PATTERNS that show the same command-and-control strategies implemented throughout history, over and over.<br />It is easy, unfortunately, to mock those who believe in so-called "conspiracy theories" because the truth of what has occurred in this weary world is so extreme and shocking that most people simply cannot believe it. What truly horrifies us becomes a target for mockery. It's a defense mechanism.<br />What is it about the UN, IMF, World Bank, International Criminal Court, world Health Organization and hundreds of others lesser known globalist facilities that people who deny or decry modern "conspiracy theory" don't understand?  <br /><br />An entire gamut of globalist entities has been superimposed on the world in the past 75 years. Most recently − only this past week, in fact − the US military held a formal exercise over the skies of Los Angeles using the same black helicopters that conspiracy theorists were mocked for mentioning not a decade ago.<br />But the biggest issue by far – bigger than even the establishment of the facilities of the New World Order – is the fundamental illiteracy of those who choose to support modern society as it is today and as it has evolved over the past 100 years.<br /><br />While human societies have always been based on fairly bizarre rituals, it is safe to say that the current crop of behind-the-scenes leaders have raised statist insanity to a new level.<br />Every part of modern society, from its basic economic building blocks to its liturgical belief in dysfunctional "laws and regulations" to its deep-seated reverence for the manipulated destruction of war, is questionable on a factual basis.<br /><br />The reality of modern society is increasingly pathological – and the ones with the pathology are those who lead the rest of us along using paradigms that are evidently and obviously dishonest and dysfunctional.<br />Articles that mock the looniness of "conspiratorialists" need to deal with the fundamental economic and sociopolitical dishonesty of their own assumptions. They should begin by admitting the evident and obvious logical fallacies of the "modern" society they celebrate.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_wbohNbQ6AKxvIl0HlNRF6ARe-bZ2sgyx7NpjjwsRIioRm2zj-rNg8W4A6DxLA3erWbNLGk2F_eNszGrD48ecvKUQcowq3f4wkB9rWg4ehIU5uDQtB6GncvAOSLcFDJHD2MCjkAYk_8z9/s1600/2424492-2-see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_wbohNbQ6AKxvIl0HlNRF6ARe-bZ2sgyx7NpjjwsRIioRm2zj-rNg8W4A6DxLA3erWbNLGk2F_eNszGrD48ecvKUQcowq3f4wkB9rWg4ehIU5uDQtB6GncvAOSLcFDJHD2MCjkAYk_8z9/s400/2424492-2-see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>WHY DO CONSPIRACY THEORIES WORRY THE ESTABLISHMENT?</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>By Ray Storch</i></span><br /><br /><div style="color: red;"><b>Don’t forget the Information Highway:</b></div><br /><span style="color: red;">THE ROMANS created roads in order to move their armies faster and thus became an empire</span><br /><div style="color: red;"><br />THE BRITISH created the railroads in order to move their armies faster and thus became an empire</div><div style="color: red;"><br />THE USA created the Information highway (Internet) in order to obtain more information and control cyber space and thus became an empire. </div><br />In all three cases it gave the civilizations a strategic and political advantage, but at the same time also provided adversaries similar gains. Nevertheless the benefits surpassed the disadvantages, for all three civilizations ended up becoming empires who dominated the world. The downside, as history has proven, is that empires are destined to fall, sooner or later…….<br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Conspiracy theories Mainstream Media versus Alternative Media </span></b></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdKIL7O0QNrrssgpByiRxWRewrhMv0TysLPcl65RVVNU6PDzQiVueZUtqxMo4nkRfiXELjZ8LDpJIP7rHObO1akxzUAIMYrASdTwofzzOAi5RWsssArSuFmO1uBjCh1hREzXdnvkrO3qMg/s1600/climate-change-conspiracy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdKIL7O0QNrrssgpByiRxWRewrhMv0TysLPcl65RVVNU6PDzQiVueZUtqxMo4nkRfiXELjZ8LDpJIP7rHObO1akxzUAIMYrASdTwofzzOAi5RWsssArSuFmO1uBjCh1hREzXdnvkrO3qMg/s320/climate-change-conspiracy.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Why do mainstream media and the political establishment oppose conspiracy theories so vehemently? Could it be because these theories are not so farfetched after all?<br /><div style="color: blue;">The internet turned out to be journalists and politician’s best friend and worst nightmare at the same time, for they are unable to control it. In the good old times one had to “believe” what media reported, without the option to verify the content. Now with the internet and its research options things changed and thus people don’t take everything for grant what mainstream media and the political establishment tries to sell or tell them. </div>Thus it comes of no surprise that these entities are becoming increasingly worried and therefore will do everything in their power to portray conspiracy theories, alternative media and information forums etc. as the creation of lunatics and thus something that cannot be taken serious, for it threatens their credibility. <br /><br /><br /><br />The proof on how uncomfortable mainstream journalism is with conspiracy theories is shown in an article published in PROFIL, an Austrian weekly magazine. The article is in German and reads as follows: <br /><i>Via Profil.at </i><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Vom Hören sagen</b></span><br /><br />Oslo, der 11. September und was Barack Obama, CIA oder die Rothschilds damit zu tun haben: Als Nachrichten getarnte Verschwörungstheorien drängen aus dem Internet in den Mainstream. Obskurantismus wird zum Massenphänomen.<br /><b>Von Sebastian Hofer</b><br /><b> </b> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbJrd8-OwDuCHKiEkG1SamyIRznHsGMiYRLYYdJonLb-La7dNcx773KRvB1bcDBhv4WTAtzqtEidtSZeRCGOHeB3bMbOv0OOIapN1W6zTOv3uVRkTjWIUw_Q2oKyaoDWUA2Lh21TiAHFuL/s1600/mainstream-media-blind-bias-peoples-cube-sad-hill-news.jpeg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbJrd8-OwDuCHKiEkG1SamyIRznHsGMiYRLYYdJonLb-La7dNcx773KRvB1bcDBhv4WTAtzqtEidtSZeRCGOHeB3bMbOv0OOIapN1W6zTOv3uVRkTjWIUw_Q2oKyaoDWUA2Lh21TiAHFuL/s320/mainstream-media-blind-bias-peoples-cube-sad-hill-news.jpeg.jpg" width="233" /></a></div>Manchmal ist das Wesentliche für die Augen leider unsichtbar. Zum Beispiel in Oslo, vor allem in den letzten Tagen. Zum Glück durchschaute Paul Joseph Watson, Blogger und Radiomoderator aus Austin, Texas, im Gegensatz zu allen beteiligten Behörden die Hintergründe von Anders Breiviks Wahnsinnstat sehr schnell, auch wenn sie ziemlich kompliziert waren. In groben Zügen lief die Sache, Watson zufolge, so: Über eine vom britischen Geheimdienst MI5 infiltrierte rechtsradikale Hooligantruppe namens English Defence League wurde Breivik von hochrangigen britischen Politikern und Geschäftsmännern finanziert und instruiert, um Norwegen auf diesem Weg für seine allzu palästinenserfreundliche Nahostpolitik abzustrafen. Belege anbei. Auch ein Einfluss der libyschen Al Kaida sei denkbar, müsse aber noch näher untersucht werden. <br /><br />Das Online-Forum, in dem Watson seine Sicht der Osloer Anschläge erläuterte, heißt Prison Planet, sieht aus wie ein ganz normaler Nachrichtenkanal und verbreitet doch sehr viel mehr, nämlich die reine, letzte und geheime Wahrheit. Also das, was die etablierten Medien offensiv verschweigen, Politiker bewusst verbergen und konspirative Cliquen hinter dicken Polstertüren zurechtbiegen. Dass diese Wahrheit irgendwie mit dem Ende der Welt (wie wir sie kennen) zusammenhängt, wird dabei gern betont (ohne dabei allzu konkret zu werden) und mit Werbebannern für Wasser-Entgiftungsanlagen, Überlebenscamps und krisensichere Goldmünzen auch marketingmäßig sehr anschaulich aufbereitet. Das eigentlich Seltsame an Prison Planet ist aber nicht seine krude Mischung aus Verschwörungstheorie, Infotainment und blankem Wahnsinn, sondern die Tatsache, dass es sich um ein Massenmedium handelt. Und dass es keineswegs allein da draußen ist. <br /><br />Im Internet hat sich in den letzten Jahren eine Art Hintergrundrauschen ausgebreitet, ein immer dichteres Netz aus verschwörungstheoretisch unterfütterten Nachrichten, Filmen und Dokumenten, das längst nicht mehr nur Paranoiker und Ufo-Gläubige einfängt, sondern zunehmend den ganz normalen Medienkonsumenten im Visier hat. Über populäre Seiten wie Prison Planet, Infowars oder Zero Hedge, millionenfach heruntergeladene Filme wie die „Zeitgeist“- oder „Loose Change“-Videos, über amerikanische Talkradio-Shows oder internationale Nachrichtenkanäle wie den konspirativ veranlagten Sender Russia Today erreichen Verschwörungstheorien heute ein Massenpublikum. Auch die etablierten Medien können sich dem Reiz der Geheimniskrämerei immer schlechter entziehen. Vor wenigen Tagen berichtete das ARD-Kulturmagazin „ttt“ geradezu euphorisch über den deutschen Publizisten Mathias Bröckers, der eine Verschwörung hinter den Anschlägen des 11. September 2001 wittert. Wohlwollender Off-Kommentar: „Auch zehn Jahre nach den vier tödlichen Flügen, nach dem Tag, der die Welt, unser Denken, unsere Ängste veränderte, gibt es noch viele offene Fragen. Mathias Bröckers stellt sie.“ Und macht damit ein richtig gutes Geschäft.<br /><br />„Man darf nicht vergessen, dass Verschwörungstheorien meistens auch gut gemachte Unterhaltung sind“, sagt der Freiburger Amerikanist Michael Butter, der seit Jahren zum Thema forscht. „Sie erzählen tolle, spannende Geschichten, wobei man oft nicht genau trennen kann, wo die Wahrheitssuche endet und wo die Geschäftemacherei beginnt. Man darf Verschwörungstheorien jedenfalls nicht damit abtun, dass man sagt: Das sind ein paar irre Paranoiker am Rande der Gesellschaft. Im Gegenteil: Es handelt sich um Massenphänomene.“ Dementsprechend erfolgreich werden obskurante Thesen für einen wachsenden Markt aufbereitet und immer unverschämter auch in die politische Debatte geworfen. Im republikanischen US-Vorwahlkampf wird, angeheizt von den verschwörerischen Thesen der prominenten Talkshow-Moderatoren Glenn Beck und Alex Jones sowie dem Anti-Establishment-Furor der Tea Party, schon seit Monaten allen Ernstes darüber diskutiert, ob Barack Obama nun wirklich und wahrhaftig Amerikaner sei oder nicht vielleicht doch ein ausländischer, mutmaßlich islamistischer Verschwörer. Ein zweites, europäisches Beispiel: Vor wenigen Wochen outeten sich etliche Schweizer Politiker als 9/11-Skeptiker. Auf der Online-Plattform www.911untersuchen.ch äußerten gleich mehrere Nationalräte ihre Zweifel an der offiziellen Version von den Anschlägen in New York und Washington. Der ehemaligen Berner Regierungsrätin Dori Schaer fiel dazu der folgende Beitrag ein: „Offen ist, ob 9/11 nur benutzt, bewusst nicht vermieden oder sogar durch US-Stellen inszeniert worden ist.“ <br /><br />Neben politischen und ökonomischen Interessen hat die gegenwärtige Verschwörungs-Hochkonjunktur aber auch eine mediale Säule, eben das Internet. Denn wirklich neu ist das Phänomen nicht, wie Michael Butter erklärt: „In den sechziger und siebziger Jahren gab es dieselben Theorien und wohl auch dieselbe Menge an überzeugten Verschwörungstheoretikern. Nur taten sie sich damals wesentlich schwerer, ihre Thesen an den Mann zu bringen.“ Im Netz dagegen fallen die traditionellen Kontrollinstanzen weg, das publizistische Ethos funktioniert online nicht oder nach ganz anderen Regeln, die Grenze zwischen Fakt und Fiktion verschwimmt, die Informationsflut wird undurchsichtiger. In diesem Umfeld werden Verschwörungstheorien als regierungskritischer Bürgerjournalismus oder „Alternativer Journalismus“ verkleidet und von „Presseagenturen“ wie dem französischen Alter Info (das mit Vorliebe iranische Propagandabotschaften und Hisbollah-Kommuniqués unter seine Meldungen streut) oder „Nachrichtenkanälen“ wie Infowars verbreitet. Obskure Spinnereien bekommen den Anschein von seriösem Expertenwissen, verbreiten sich in atemberaubender Geschwindigkeit und gewinnen allein schon durch ihre massenhafte Präsenz an Glaubwürdigkeit – ein sich selbst verstärkendes Hörensagen, das auch von der antiautoritären Grundverfasstheit des Internets profitiert, derzufolge das Establishment schon einmal a priori verdächtig ist. Den Soundtrack zum „Truth Movement“ liefern regierungskritische Musiker wie der Wiener Rapper Kilez More, die Werbung für einschlägige Nachrichtenseiten erfolgt per Graffiti. Verschwörung ist auch Popkultur. <br /><br />In diesem Rahmen verdeckt die Frage „Wem kann man noch glauben?“ leider eine viel wesentlichere, nämlich: „Was sollte man eigentlich wissen?“ Der Politologe Peter Filzmaier erkennt darin ein Symptom von „erschütternd geringer Mediennutzungskompetenz: Viele Leute erkennen den Unterschied zwischen seriöser Berichterstattung und obskuren Verschwörungstheorien schlicht nicht.“ Kein Wunder: Wenn auch in seriösen Medien Information und Entertainment zunehmend zum Infotainment verschwimmen, wenn sich Wissenschaftssendungen mit Ufos und Atlantis beschäftigen und politische Talkshows über islamistische Verschwörungen debattieren, erscheinen auch abstruse Konzepte wie eine von Freimaurern, Illuminaten, jüdischen Bankiers und der Bilderberg-Gruppe angestrebte „Neue Weltordnung“ nicht mehr ganz so abstrus.<br /><br />Dazu kommt, dass neuere Verschwörungstheorien an ihren vernünftigeren Enden durchaus anschlussfähig für eine rationale Gesellschaftskritik sind. Dass der ehemalige US-Vizepräsident Dick Cheney aufgrund seiner engen Verbindungen zur Rüstungsindustrie auch private Interessen in den Irakkrieg schickte, liefert ebenso begründeten Anlass zu weiterführender Spekulation wie die enge Allianz zwischen US-Politik und Wall Street nach der Bankenkrise 2008. Michael Butter: „Was Verschwörungstheorien verbindet, ist, dass sie in mehr oder weniger verzerrter Form auf echte oder wahrgenommene soziale Probleme hinweisen, zum Beispiel auf ein wachsendes Misstrauen gegenüber der amerikanischen Politik. Auch deshalb sollte man sie durchaus ernst nehmen.“ Der Vietnamveteran, Ex-Wrestler und ehemalige Gouverneur von Minnesota Jesse Ventura, Star der vom US-Kabelsender TruTV ausgestrahlten Reihe „Conspiracy Theory“, garniert seinen soeben auf Deutsch erschienenen Bestseller „Die amerikanische Verschwörung. 9/11 und andere Lügen“ denn auch mit einem Zitat von Albert Einstein: „Blinder Glaube an die Obrigkeit ist der schlimmste Feind der Wahrheit.“<br /><br />Der schlimmste Feind der Vernunft wiederum ist die Angst. Zum Glück können Verschwörungstheorien auch diese verringern – oder zumindest in geordnete Bahnen lenken. Es mag schrecklich sein, von unbekannten Mächten kontrolliert und getäuscht zu werden, aber eben nicht ganz so schrecklich wie die Vorstellung, dass ein 32-jähriger Psychopath nicht daran gehindert werden kann, in einer guten Stunde 68 Menschen zu erschießen. So etwas kann nicht wahr sein, also muss mehr dahinterstecken. So wie es auch nicht wahr sein kann, dass kein Staatschef, kein Zentralbanker der Welt ein echtes Rezept gegen die Kreditkrise hat. So hilflos kann die Politik doch nicht sein. Also muss sie lügen. Verschwörungstheorien bieten Erklärungen an, schließen Zufälle aus und verringern so die Angst vor dem Chaos. Alles hängt mit allem zusammen, und das hat alles schon seine Ordnung so. <br /><br />Weniger klar ist die ideologische Ordnung hinter der Verschwörungsaufdecker-Szene. Auf die These, dass hinter den Anschlägen vom 11. September ein Regierungskomplott steckt, können sich amerikanische Rednecks und Schweizer Grünpolitiker, antisemitische Norweger und New Yorker Globalisierungskritiker gleichermaßen einigen. Wo alles auf undurchschaubare Weise mit allem zusammenhängt, wo 9/11, Bankenkrise, Waffenlobby, Freimaurer, Klimawandel, Islamismus und Grippeepidemien Teil derselben Verschwörungsszenerie sein können, kann es auch zu seltsamen Allianzen kommen. Die Welt der Verschwörer ist eine Scheibe, die sich so rasend schnell dreht, dass rechts und links schwer voneinander zu unterscheiden sind. Der Freiburger Experte Michael Butter: „Verschwörungserzählungen schaffen Kollektive, von denen man sich zunächst gar nicht vorstellen kann, wie sie zusammenkommen konnten. Wenn man konkreter hinsieht, erweist sich aber die Schlüssigkeit dieses Prinzips: In dem gleichen Grundgerüst können, mit kleinen Veränderungen an den entsprechenden Scharnieren, rechte wie linke Ideologien andocken.“ Auch die wahrste Wahrheit muss schließlich interpretiert werden. Bleibt es bei der Interpretation, stellt das nur ein intellektuelles Problem dar. Dass es dabei bleibt, ist leider gar nicht so sicher. Der deutsche Historiker Wolfgang Wippermann hat diesbezüglich jedenfalls Bedenken: „Wir unterschätzen die Wirksamkeit von Verschwörungsideologien. Dieses Denken ist gefährlich, denn Ideologie ist nicht nur falsches Bewusstsein, sondern auch ein Indikator von realen politischen und historischen Vorgängen. Das wird verwirklicht.“ <br />Andererseits: Das ist der CIA bestimmt schon längst bewusst. Und die hat schließlich ihre Mittel.<br />1.8.2011

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